Hey Mortality (17 page)

The very last time I occupied the future. Everything else in my life now fated to happen before that very moment; the last second I existed in the present.

With those thoughts pouring into my head, I was forever gone.

***

I woke up in a hospital bed. That same room as before with its yellow stained walls. The pain was gone; they had most likely pumped by body full of chemicals. There was no calendar. No nurse. No concept of time any more. Only the empty room.

I began to think a lot. Every waking thought could be my very last. No way of knowing when it would end. I thought briefly about myself, trapped now forever in that loop we created. That loop that protects the universe from ending. Eternity. Myself, almost never happy and set up for a life of misery. Destined for loss. Unable to steer his path. Unable to change his fate. He has my life now, without knowing. But there will be some good times, the thrill of making money, the joy of playing music, the birth of his daughter. Other things won’t be so good, Sara’s death, Amanda’s death, his daughter’s death. Our death.

I wished I could be awake when he visited, tell him how things go, but I knew I couldn’t. I had no choice but to let his life slip into that comatose cycle that we were destined to live by. But why should he not get that choice? The choice between love and eternity, the choice between life and death.

I stayed in the hospital bed for what felt like months, I knew it was just a few days, but emotions there moved a lot slower than time.

At night I had those weird dreams again, the first time I was the man shouting, holding the sign outside the Bank Building. Shouting at myself in the future to never go back. Live your life there, don’t take the leap. My words, it seemed, could not be heard. Futile attempts to bring myself happiness. Erase all that I had done.

In my waking state I knew how those dreams turned out; unchangeable, incomprehensible.

In my second dream, I was a man without a face. I tried to explain what Lucy had told me about the universe splitting apart. Relay the things to myself at the Bridge at the Centre of the Universe. I don’t think that the younger me understood the relevance.

I laid in bed also thinking of the relevance of those dreams. Our lives now a continuous loop that bound together the fabric of time. The universe could no longer fall apart; tied together by the loop we created.

I kept on dreaming, always the same, as if sending off messages to a faraway place.

One day, the dream was strange. A different place. The sky fell in and one of the ducks got killed. Was that the universe falling apart? Did I do something wrong? I wondered.

In my waking state, I looked at the possibilities of mistakes. Was the loop we created actually perfect? Would it come apart like a badly tied knot; fraying slightly and getting looser and looser each time, with each and every cycle? And what of Lucy? She would be the next time traveller, Keiko most likely the one after her. Were we all part of Lucy’s loop, or if not, then would Lucy do enough to mend time? I thought about all of that. Thinking about those things, I drifted away, and slept for the very last time.

***

In the final dream of my lifetime, I was walking on a thin carpet of shallow ice. A blue hue lurked beneath the surface. Young or old, I had no concept of my appearance. The ice offered no reflection, no confirmation. I looked at my hands, they were smooth, soft, like a child. Perhaps not my hands. I delicately touched my cheek with my right hand, my skin also soft, absent of any facial hair. Perfectly smooth and seemingly young.

I began to walk on the ice, walk toward an image sitting somewhere on the horizon of that vast plain of blue glass. A woman. She was wearing nothing but a black hooded top, hood up, legs exposed. A perfect whiteness of legs that too displayed no indication of age. Legs kneeling on the coldness of ice.

As I got closer, I could make out the face of Lucy, but I couldn’t tell which point in time she belonged to. Lover or daughter, Lucy displayed no age; just a face shrouded by a shadowy hood. Somehow I knew it was her though. The contours of her face, her blonde hair, short this time. White teeth that sparkled and reflected the invisible moon.

As I wandered toward her, I felt the ice cracking below me. It started with just sound, the sound of breaking ice, stretching off in every direction. Eventually, I could see the cracks forming around my feet, like lightning bolts firing off from the floor around me.

A second later, I was consumed by the cold, enveloped by the icy water as I fell through its surface.

Moments passed, a length of time that couldn’t be measured. Lucy pulled me out from the clutches of the cold, dragged me back to the surface. My breathing as shallow as the ice itself.

My breath left a trace of smoke, white breath, like on a cold spring morning. Her arm around me like the arm of a loved one wrapped around me as I slept.

I reached my frozen hands toward her, wrapped them around her. We shivered together, rocked together, trying to keep warm, and trying to protect each other from the cold my dream had created.

We held that position for a time, embracing that hug; our last hug. As my nerves rejected the cold, my body became completely numb. I could no longer feel her touch, she undoubtedly, could no longer feel mine.

As we froze to death together, I woke up.

***

I laid in that hospital bed, but not for the last time. My body was still icy cold, numb, as if still consumed by the frozen water of my dreams. Death had his hands fastened tightly around my throat. I was alone for the very last time. Conscious for the very last time, I could feel it. I had very little left. I had nothing left, except perhaps time itself. But even my time was about to slip away; on fine ice.

As my mind connected with my final thought, I knew that everything would go on, almost forever, until there was no sand left on the beach.

I read the
manuscript with a shaking head and a hungover heart. I might have skipped the odd page here and there, and I must have blacked out midway through; as the night has faded and I can see that the morning has crept into Tokyo, leaving behind any trace of last night.

Hey Mortality, a strange title, but I think I got the general idea; a story about time travel.

A part of me considers travelling to the other side of Japan to look for a specifically marked tombstone, hell, there is nothing left for me here in the slums anyway, and I could do with the distraction.

I decide to enjoy the cover of clouds on what is a warm day, and wander over to Asakusa to get my fortune from the temple.

Despite not knowing who delivered the story to my letter box, if anyone, the mystery really doesn’t seem to matter to me in my half asleep state. I am not even sure if I did sleep last night. Regardless of sleep, I am in good spirits as I amble past prostitutes and brothels, before arriving at Sensō-ji Temple.

The temple is packed with tourists and Japanese alike, snapping photographs of the five-storied pagoda, or wafting incense in their general direction to help free them from the wrath of evil spirits.

I join the end of a small queue of four women waiting to collect their fortune. When I reach the front of the line, I take a wooden stick from a metal tube with an octagonal lid, before matching the Japanese characters with those written neatly above a small wooden drawer. It is inside this drawer where my fortune is contained. It says:

“Bad Fortune. Number 100. Your happiness in the past was hidden among the clouds, like you lost all your dependence. Going over a mountain with a harp means that you have hidden yourself from the world. If you can’t meet a hermit, after climbing up mountains, you will not feel yourself at ease. You will be completely at loss with your empty heart.”

As fortunes go, this one is quite accurate. Perhaps there is some truth to Buddhism after all. I keep my fortune, despite the custom of tying a bad fortune up and letting the gods’ carry it away. I keep it, fold it neatly in my wallet, and search out my metaphorical harp.

With little else to do today, I decide to check the huge map of the area, and am instantly drawn in by the name of the Drawing Light Temple.

As the morning sunshine creeps through crowds and clouds, I spend thirty minutes wandering the huge complex of temples and shrines that make up the Sensō-ji compound, before I eventually find a rather obscure looking tunnel with overhanging plants and flowers of a nondescript nature. Oddly, having visited this area many times in the past, I have never before seen this tunnel.

Hidden beyond the foliage and on the other side of the tunnel sits a huge temple, the Drawing Light Temple. Built in 1609, this temple houses the goddess of protection from drawing light images. Luckily, an English sign serves to remove any confusion, and tells me that, “The goddess in this temple protects against photography, portraits, and reflections.” Ironically, photography is allowed here.

As I read the signboards about the history of this place, it becomes instantly apparent that if this temple was built in 1609, like the sign states, then it precedes the very first photograph, making it impossible for the goddess that resides here to know what she would be protecting against in the future. My mind quietly flickers to the manuscript I found, the photograph, and time travel, before settling back in this holy place of imageless beings.

Inside the grounds of the Drawing Light Temple, a statue of a cow sits next to a sign that says, “Look closely.” I stare at the cow, not really sure what I am supposed to be seeing. Everything here looks perfectly normal, just a statue of a cow. Below the sign there is a description in Japanese, which again has a handy English translation, stating, “As a way to protect the stolen soul, in the cow, your image will be hidden from the drawing of light.”

I take a photograph of the cow, and oddly, my image isn’t present; very strange. I take several more photographs from various different angles, yet, each time the scenery behind me is visible, but my own reflection is mysteriously erased. Why a cow has been chosen to symbolise the absence of reflection is beyond me, but some sort of wizardry is at hand here. A trick of the light perhaps, or am I actually invisible or dead.

Continuing my exploration of this hidden temple, I discover that it holds the origin of the story that a photograph can steal your soul. It is said that when this temple was built before photographs were invented, the thought of an image of a person being captured was a direct link to the spiritual world. This history has also spread to the rest of the Sensō-ji area, where no mirrors can be seen at any of the temples or shrines. It makes me wonder if the Edo Period in Japan was populated by time travellers, building temples everywhere that predict future inventions, taking photographs of tourists in Yoshiwara, and writing books that don’t exist yet.

As I leave the Drawing Light Temple, I discover another display of inconsistent historical information, a lantern.

The Stone Lantern of Rokujizō was built in either 1146 or 1368, and already I find that there are too many contradictions. The sign even states that the details are unknown, yet, the lantern itself features typography that wasn’t used until 1834. So somehow, the lantern features Japanese text that was first used 688 years or 466 years after it was originally built. I am not sure of the relevance of these dates, but this fact will most likely remain on the sign forever, never to be analysed by anyone else again.

Even the story about the origin of Sensō-ji, about a golden statue of
Kannon
fished from a lake, is riddled in confusion; the statue is no longer housed in Sensō-ji Temple, and has never actually been seen by anyone that can prove it existed in the first place. It all makes me very suspicious about religion; contradictions and false information. Thinking about the possibility that religion, stories, and some gods’ might not be even real, is something I had often considered before, and now it starts to become clearer in my mind. Maybe all of it is lies. I think about this for a moment as a wander to a small bridge over a lake of carp. I stand and contemplate and let ideas of religion flood through my mind, before shaking my head and continuing exploring.

My suspicions surrounding the history behind Sensō-ji Temple are once again confirmed at the monument to Kume no Heinai. He was a samurai in the Edo Period, and a master of sword fighting. He killed many people over the years, before eventually turning good. He began to live in Kongo-in Temple, inside Sensō-ji Temple, and devoted himself to Zen Buddhism; holding religious services in honour of the souls of the people he killed. One day, he ordered his followers to carve his figure in stone, and bury it in a busy district of Asakusa, so that forever, people would step on him; presumably what he thought he deserved after years of killing. Oddly, Heinai was in good health the day the statue was ordered to be built, however, the next day, he died suddenly, as if his fate was already known.

As I leave the compound full of conspiracies, paranoia, and sick of stories that don’t add up, I see it, the sign that confirms to me all, the Bell of Time.

The innocent looking bell housed in a wooden structure, to the untrained eye, wouldn’t be significant. To my overactive imagination, this confirms my earlier suspicions that religion, or at least the area around Sensō-ji Temple, was built by time travellers, and this bell was their time machine. The inscription has been erased, but it probably said something that they didn’t want me to see.

I leave Sensō-ji and start my walk back home. On my way to the Plum Ship, I pass Hanazono Pond and head to the shutter door. But, like everything else in my life, hidden amongst newly formed clouds, the painting is gone.